CyberFonic

The clue in your description is that you are a software engineer in management. I would guess that most if not all the other managers are from non-technical backgrounds. Thus they are directly or indirectly indoctrinated into MBA and/or McKinsey Management Consulting group-think. Only the insecure and their sychophants would instigate the sorts of practices that you describe.

Hate to put it bluntly, but you are attempting to swim against the tide by attempting any form of debate and examination of dissent. The management team around you have played their hand. It appears that you are vastly out-numbered.

You have two choices: go with the status quo; or the highway.

Which room? Why do you ask?

Sadly that is a very common situation. Thus even more fitting to celebrate those who are still working, learning and enjoying their programming careers.

The only Power based supercomputers I can think of are all from IBM. Does any other vendor use them?

Power CPUs tend to power either iSeries (latest iteration of AS/400 - System38 etc) systems or AIX based. The large AIX systems use lots of CPUs, cores and typically vPars - but I wouldn't call them supercomputers. Disk I/O is generally FC attached SAN, i.e. performance is achieved through off-loading. A typical SAN array contains gigabytes of caching memory, CPUs on each disk drive with yet more RAM and multiple optical FC links to each node.

I have worked for companies that used both. Based on those experiences:

Use Power RISC with AIX in established IBM user organisation that wanted to run Unix software so we ported existing software to AIX.

Use existing s390 system running several core systems, to run Unix partitions to deploy software already written for Unix in C.

I have never even heard of any company not already being an IBM account migrating to either of those systems. The capital and operating costs are typically far higher than for comparable performance x86 based deployments. Technical staffing is much harder still.

It's many years since I last saw or worked on a PDP-11. The only operational ones I know of are as embedded systems, that includes LSI-11 variants. That is, industrial and niche scientific applications.

I have worked extensively in finance and have never seen nor heard of a PDP-11 being used. A long time ago some DecSystems were in use. But those were all programmed in COBOL.

I'm struggling with your question, yet intrigued by the problem.

When you are new in an organisation, it is very common to feel awkward in making smalltalk and being remote would make it even more so. What technology are you conducting your conversations with? With Zoom you can read body language, etc. Using messaging alone provides far less clues.

I presume that you have been assigned a mentor and some tasks to perform. In which case, I would expect that your conversations pertain to the work you are doing and not shooting the breeze by the water cooler. Perhaps a good starting step would be to talk about aspects of the tasks at hand and then expand from there, asking about the decisions that led to the design / architecture / tool choices and from there the roles and personalities involved.

They should be paying you more, because they are saving on office space rental when you work remotely.

So they are not only saving on salaries, but on rents as well. Cheeky bastards.

Yet another example of how clueless managements are. They are incapable of actually assessing value of the actual work performed. So they use proxy metrics like LoC, hours worked, in-person presence in the office.

If you want to paid very well, then churn out thousands of lines of rubbish code, be in the office for 70+ hours, attend their meetings, pay rapt attention to their PowerPoints and laugh at their jokes. Bingo!

Selling the vision is both an in-house as well as marketing aspect. When you have hundreds of people working on the product design and realisation, the CEO has to figure out how to make payroll, keep investors happy, get suppliers to extend greater levels of credit, ensure that manufacturing ramps up. Successful CEOs are not micromanagers. Steve Jobs is well known for providing scathing feedback, but not for actually sitting down and sketching out designs.

I did some work with SWI-Prolog. It is useful when the problem can be effectively translated into Prolog's preferred form of terms and rules. But the solver mechanism only solves a subset of logical inference needs. Prolog's use of logic in AI should not be conflated with the AI/ML systems which use networks of floating point operations, i.e. not boolean operations.

As always, best to choose the tool / language that best suits the problem.

United Nations has 193 member countries. Of those only a handful can lay claim to having one or more big open-source projects/libraries/languages. So the question does not relate solely to India.

Looking at what factors lead to such results might provide some insights as to what could be done to foster such contributions.

In financial capitals, actuaries are amongst the top earners on par with lawyers.

I know several very successful actuaries who also write a fair bit of advanced code. Insurance companies are always looking for quantitative improvements and it is far more expedient when the actuary doesn't have to explain (in excruciating detail) the requirements to a programmer without the same math chops.